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It is not always the destination that matters; it’s the journey that one takes to get there. Oh, what a long, strange trip it’s been.
Yes, I was reluctant to take the cross-country trek to Kisumu. My coworker, Joseph, invited me as I expressed interest in viewing Lake Victoria. Along with climbing Mount Kenya and embarking on an overly expensive tourist safari, capturing a glimpse of Lake Victoria were the top adventures on my Kenyan bucket list.
“It will only take 12 hours to get there—we will sleep most of it. We’ll board in Malindi at 5:30 and be in Kisumu Town by 6 AM,” Joseph said, reassuringly. His family lived “around Kisumu” and he hadn’t seen them in five years.
I could do 12 hours. Really it would only be 4, I reasoned; I would be sound asleep for the majority of the trip.
And just like that, on Thursday afternoon, we were running ‘late.’ By ‘late,’ I mean that I was the one waiting. In reality, I am starting to understand this African time. I told my buddy to call when he was ready. I relaxed on my couch until I got the phone call.
By around 5 o’clock, we went to the booking office in Malindi. No busses leaving tonight. It never crosses a Kenyan’s mind to go to the booking office before a long journey. It just isn’t part of the culture. So, on a matatu to Mombassa. Trip time: 2 hours.
When we reached Mombassa, we went to the coach station where all the busses lined up to go to Nairobi, Kisumu, Nakuru—all of the major towns in Kenya. Joseph talked to a few of the bus agents and finally found the last two seats of a bus departing that night. We would have to wait until 9:30PM. Okay, that’s fine, I thought. Just a bit more sleeping on the trip. Besides, I gave up stress for Lent. Trip time: 4.5 hours.
After eating a quick Swahili dinner (that I worried would cause gastrointestinal issues on the long ride), we boarded the bus. The small, seemingly second-hand coach had to have crossed Kenya a multitude of times. The cabin consisted of 30 or red uncomfortable upholstered seats, a very narrow aisle, and fortunately, an overhead baggage compartment. As I took the window seat, I noticed there were no armrests-- and for good reason—my shoulder slightly overlapped with Joseph’s. Our knees hit the seat in front of us. There was no lever to recline (of course not) and the anguish that would make any Westerner ache: no air conditioning.
The bus company’s title is “Rapture” but all I could think about was that this may possibly be Dante’s inner circle of hell. By the time we departed, my right sleeve felt as though it were a slough; my shoulder sweating snuggly under Joseph’s. I promised myself never to complain about a Megabus again. With the wind, however, it was bearable.
And then, the speed humps. You will not find a major road without them. Like matatus or pikki pikkis, speed humps are everywhere in this country. As soon as I was asleep, we hit a speed hump. Annoying as a younger sibling but more jarring, the speed humps served as a hellish and unwanted snooze alarm.
I had gotten some sleep by the time we reached Nairobi. The heat had cooled off in the highlands and although the speed humps were a nuisance, we rode a long stretch of highway without them. I awoke around midnight to a bright half-moon disclosing the inky and ephemeral silhouette of a southward mountain. Dark cumulous clouds floated above the mountain gingerly, breaching for numerous vivid stars millions of light years away. It was one of those moments that come out of nowhere… and like many times on the trip, made me realize that the discomfort that comes from wanderlust and adventure rarely surpasses the awe of it.
At Nairobi, we relieved ourselves and found ourselves in a chaotic scene: the spurious Rapture men lied about our journey being ‘express’ to Kisumu. So, we simply followed a man in an oversized khaki sports coat to another bus—slightly larger but still knockoff—and climbed in to find two seats. We got our tickets, the departure time scribbled on them: 6am. It was 5am. I took out my U-shaped travel pillow (thank God it wasn’t leopard skin, La) and quickly fell asleep. I was woken up intermittently by salesman who would simply walk onto the bus with handfuls of anything that you could possibly need or want: water, juice, cookies (called biscuits), groundnuts, magazines, flashlights, locks and keys, chains, small radios, shovels... you name it. They would make a 'sssss' sound to get your attention... and coincidentally I dreamed I was being attacked by snakes. Trip time: 12 hours.
Auto-tune has hitchhiked its way to Africa on the backs of Chris Brown, Lil Wayne and the granddaddy of them all—T. Pain—but it has found a mainstay through local Kenyan pop. This proved to be another hellish alarm clock at 6:00am. To add salt to the wound, the song was entitled “Kenyan Time.” Why would anyone play this music so early? Theme number one of my journey. The irony lasted 3.5 hours, as we finally departed at 9am. Trip time: 16.5 hours.
The waiting though, was another blessing in disguise. The world was alive and well lit in order for me to view the Rift Valley, some zebras and the beauty that is tea country. Kenya is the 3rd largest exporter of tea in the world. On a stop through Kericho, I bought some black tea that I will need to try in this upcoming week.
Prior to this stop, though, I had one of the most awkward and bizarre pit stops of my life. I asked Joseph what we were doing, and he replied, “Taking care of ourselves.” We pulled over on the side of the road, where there was a T in the highway. On both sides of the bottom half of the T, a tilled farm spread over the land. All the men, like they were in some sort of religious ceremony, gathered to the left. They then proceeded to drop trough and relieve themselves with no sense of privacy or bashfulness. As a Westerner, well, I lingered behind a bit. This lack of privacy, though, will be a common theme throughout this trip, I would soon discover. As I finished, zipped, and turned around to face the T, the women were squatting shamelessly, skirts yanked up past their knees, jeans around their ankles, canary streams of urea and ammonia flowing to nurture the cultivated fields of Kenya. I looked away instantly, embarrassed.
We pulled into Kisumu around 4 PM. My anxiousness to get off of the coach seemed to be at its apex and finally, my feet hit pavement. We needed to get to Joseph’s village of Misori (pronounced like the state!), which required a matatu. When I asked how long it took to get there, Joseph confidently said two more hours. Wow. Just when I thought that I hit the nadir of my suffering… he pulled this on me. And what was worse—a matatu.
Matatus are the bane of an African traveler’s existence. Stuffed, hot, unreliable, loud, and prone to break down or run out of gas at any minute, they quickly cruise down roads, hitting every bump possible. Gutted only to possess the bare necessities for travel—13 cloth seats (rarely with seatbelts) and not much room for more. And for good reason: those 13 seats often have a morass of 25 people crammed into them. Like a real-life clown car, the drivers (who privately own or are employed privately) will do anything for an extra a hundred shillings, packing us travelers like sardines into an ersatz VW bus. Often pimped-out on the outside with vibrant purple and blue paint jobs, these drivers crave the attention for business. For a reason unbeknownst to me, they all seem to possess aphoristic window stickers such as “No Pain, No Gain,” “Big Mama” or any other trite/moronic/meaningless maxim that you could possibly ponder. In 2007, when Elliott Miller graced this fine country, Obama stickers ubiquitously peppered every other matatu. It seems, akin to the president’s popularity in the United States, that this fad is fading here in Kenya.
Where to sit in the matatu requires a great deal of strategy. The first obvious choice is the front seat, where only three can sit, due to the driver’s comfort. These are taken first, and then the back, usually. In the back, the passenger rarely has to shift, although legroom is at a minimal and one may have a few goose eggs due to lacking suspension. The middle two rows are close to the bottom of the list—with each new passenger along the way, one either needs to shift or get out and reenter to claim a spot (a competitive waltz not for the weak-hearted). The last choice, though, goes to hanging out of the sliding door. This is rarely an option for tourists and of course, is against the law.
I was in the row behind the driver, closest to the door, and downright miserable. At one point, one of the conductors (who collects money) repeatedly said, “White man, white man!” To which I replied, “Now… that is a GREAT observation. You can see that my skin is white!” Everyone laughed. We finally got to the small town of Bondo by 6:00pm. Trip Time: 25 hours.
We squeezed out of that god-forsaken matatu and Joseph began speaking in Luo to a motorcycle (pikkipikki) driver, the language of the Western part of the country. There are 42 languages spoken in Kenya, so I had no idea what he was saying. I thought that we were a stone’s throw away from the lake, and that a short pikkipikki ride would place us at our destination. They negotiated the price (Joseph didn’t seem pleased), and he told me to jump on the Boxer (the most common Chinese motorcycle in Kenya). Joseph climbed on next. There I was, the meat of a Kenyan sandwich. The driver, adorned in a Dallas cowboy jacket and my backpack hanging onto his torso as if he were giving birth to my weekend wardrobe, drove us toward the coast of Lake Victoria in the setting sun.
“How long will this trip take?”
“About an hour.”
I should have known better. As the temperature dropped (along with my jaw) and a bug nosedived into my retina, I told myself: only in Africa.
Trip time: 26 hours.
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